The News: To A Dairy Farmer, After the End

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

From the earliest days of the American republic, the farm was a nexus that connected the advancing edge of settler empire in the frontier with the plantations of the South and the conversion of Eastern farms into industrial and urban properties. Waves of immigrants set out in clusters to make farms and ranches in territories and states as railroads moved their produce and meat back into the industrial cities. Former slaves looked for a plot of their own on which to secure their freedom. Water flowed from the rivers of the dry West to make bountiful harvests where little had grown.

And always, the farm was where the American dream was one drought, one sickness, one fire, one crushing debt, away from failure. Heart-breaking stories of the failure of a family farm are one of the deepest genres of American storytelling. The imagined failure of many farms at once lies at the heart of many political crises since the late 19th Century. The bipartisan commitment to massive financial subsidy of American agriculture since the 1970s flourished despite Reaganism and despite further waves of neoliberal austerity precisely because of the cultural power of stories about families losing their farms, even as most farms became outposts of large agribusinesses with farming families serving as little more than managers for conglomerate owners.

No matter how much I remind myself of this history, and of the reality of what farming has become in the United States, I still find myself deeply moved when I read of people who have lived on the land and tended crops and livestock having to give it up. Sometimes that’s still the old story that the next generation has moved on to other futures and aspirations, a story which is just as associated with small businesses or local industries. And sometimes it’s another kind of old story: the banks and the big businesses grind the farmer down, distant marketplaces shift and the farmer sees all profit turn to loss, the government turns some knobs or changes some laws and an abyss opens up underneath the farmer’s feet.

That’s the story of the failure of a six-generation dairy farm called Butter Ridge, as told to the New York Times. It’s a carefully written and honestly witnessed account of the last days of a Watson family farm after the current owner, Brad Watson, takes stock of his mounting losses and decides it’s time to call it quits.

I felt after reading that I wanted to actually write to Brad and his family, but I don’t imagine that what I have to say would be welcome. Two emotions warred within me as I read: immense sympathy and love for the Watsons and the world they had made, and frustration with their misplaced political commitment. It’s only one short moment in the story, but the NYT writer must have known it would become a major preoccupation for many of its readers: Brad Watson voted for Trump in 2024, believing that Trump’s pledge to be “pro-farmer” would mean a reversal of the trends that are killing off American dairy farms. Instead, the opposite happened: Trump’s trade wars and then his military attack on Iran moved Butter Ridge from being threatened to failing.

And yet, in my imagined letter, I would say this to Brad: I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you for imagining that someone as profoundly violating of political norms like Trump might be the only thing that could break the trends and systems that had been slowly strangling the family business for decades. I don’t blame you, Brad, because you doubtless thought that Kamala Harris would provide you little help and in that you would have been right. She might not have killed your farm right away the way Trump did, but she wouldn’t have saved it, either. Your father, Brian Watson, is right to think that political power in this country isn’t aligned in the favor of ordinary people, that it just panders to family farmers.

I would have loved for your family to keep on running your farm. I love that you named all your cows and knew each of them. I love that your son Boyd kept one cow named Parachute for himself, to imagine another generation of farming possibility. I hate that there’s a man whose entire job is auctioning off the livestock and equipment of failed farms, even though I don’t hate the man himself. Those cows may lose their names and the meaning they held to the Watsons, but they’re still being milked somewhere else.

But I do need to understand why people who want to keep lives in place can’t see that a person like Trump is not only going to break every promise he makes like most politicians do, but he and the people around him are going to break, are breaking, far more, with deliberate intent. I need to understand why people who want to keep what they have feel so indifferent to the destruction of other working worlds, other communities, other lives. I love that the Watsons’ had their life. I want a government, a country, a world, that would have fought to help them keep it. I can’t say from the NYT article whether Brad Watson would show that love to all the other people who stand to lose the worlds of value and meaning they have made, but I am sure that many other Trump voters did not in casting their vote. I hope, if they are now seeing the growing ruin that is America, that their hearts are growing rather than shrinking.

Life in America is not and need not be a zero-sum. We can have family farms and universities, small businesses in rural towns and science labs, car dealerships and public libraries devoted to free expression. We can have churches and nightclubs.

There’s only one business that we should all harden our hearts toward, one place where we want to see it emptied out, and that’s the halls and manors of a small corrupt elite that has taken over our economy and our government. I would guess Brad wanted the swamp drained, but I would hope that he hates as much as I do that the swamp has been replaced by a sewer.

I want a future where Boyd gets to live how he wants on the land that he owns, where if he wants Parachute to be the first of another herd, that’s possible. I want a future for the Watsons before a future that’s for Monsanto. I hope Brian finds another future, as he hopes, whether in natural gas or otherwise. I want a government and economy for the people, of the people. I just hope the Watsons want as much for all the other people staring at a barren space where the future used to be.

We all have to hope for each other against the people who make our lives hopeless.